Quotes By Milan Kundera

Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.

He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.

Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.

The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

There are no small parts. Only small actors.

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

I find myself fascinating.

Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.

Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.

To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.

No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.

When I was a little boy in short pants, I dreamed about a miraculous ointment that would make me invisible. Then I became an adult, began to write, and wanted to be successful. Now I'm successful and would like to have the ointment that would make me invisible.

Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.

Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.